If that was it, though—if she actually wanted him to keep coming to the cliffs and singing for her—then that was worse than insanity. Hearing him would be all the pretext Anais would need to persuade the other mermaids to attack her, for one thing. She should want the human boy to forget about her as soon as possible. Talking with him would be pointless even if he didn’t hate her so much, and Luce had to admit, so deservedly . . . It suddenly occurred to her that he might be trying to lure her close enough that he could murder her in revenge. Maybe he was carrying a knife, even a gun.

She slid quickly along under the surface, not bothering with any singing games this time, and popped up fifty yards from the cliffs. She was careful to hold her face lowered toward the water, to keep him from seeing a telltale patch of pale skin out on the dark waves. Luce hovered in place with just a slight rippling of her fins, comfortable with the steep lift and fall as her body rode the swells.

His voice was very faint at this distance, a melodic scratching on the wind, but he was there. Luce was incredulous, again, at just how terrible human singing was, but he was clearly doing his best to reproduce the song Luce had used back when she’d lured humans to their deaths. Really, he sounded even worse than last time, as if he’d sung his throat raw. The notes croaked and sputtered, flapping awkwardly over the sea like wounded crows. She didn’t know whether to think it was funny—or horribly, wrenchingly sad.

His voice was thick with heartsickness, Luce realized, with icy grief and loneliness as blue-black as the Alaskan sky in deep winter. And all that suffering was her fault. As she kept listening, she noticed a new emotion seeping from that voice as well: frustration and the beginnings of rage. He was getting furious with her for failing to appear. He wouldn’t just give up, Luce suddenly realized. Instead he’d only turn crazier, more extreme . . .

Didn’t he understand that she couldn’t talk to him? The timahk stood between them, of course, along with the risk that her old tribe would discover them together, but there was also the whole untamed vastness of the sea. Luce remembered reading somewhere that the sea covered two-thirds of the earth. To humans the sea was only an afterthought, but in reality it was the dominant force, the roiling mind of the planet, and she was a part of it now. As far as the sea was concerned, human life—his life—was filthy and insignificant. Just a source of leaking poisons.